Columbia ignoring its Core Curriculum?

Response to comms from the President’s office from a hypothetical CU professor (Drafted privately for reflection, consideration, or public statement)

To my colleagues, students, and the Columbia community,

As a faculty member entrusted with teaching Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, I am reminded daily that the very purpose of a university is not merely to maintain order, but to cultivate reason, conscience, and the moral imagination. The Core invites our students — and challenges our institution — to confront questions of power, justice, resistance, and truth. It is precisely in moments of tension that those commitments are tested.

This statement, while clothed in the language of balance and safety, functions instead as a tacit endorsement of surveillance, disciplinary overreach, and selective moral outrage. I say this with great care.

On the one hand, the letter condemns antisemitism — as it must. Antisemitism, like all forms of hate and dehumanisation, has no place on this campus or anywhere. But the statement fails — conspicuously and tellingly — to acknowledge or protect the academic freedom, political speech, and moral commitments of students, faculty, and staff who are engaged in nonviolent protest, often in the service of human rights.

It makes no mention of the militarisation of campus space. No reckoning with the chilling effect of police presence. No empathy for Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, or allied students who also feel unsafe — not because of peers’ chants, but because of administrative silence, vilification, and the threat of expulsion or blacklisting.

If we taught Antigone with integrity this year, we cannot now claim neutrality when state power is used to suppress moral protest. If we taught Mill, we cannot invoke “disruption” as justification for curtailing expression. If we taught Arendt, we must name the bureaucratised evasion of moral responsibility for what it is.

The selective invocation of “safety” here is not ethically neutral — it is political. It draws a hard boundary around whose fears count, and whose grief is legible. In doing so, it corrodes the trust between the university and those who believe in its highest mission: not comfort, not control, but the pursuit of truth, even when — especially when — it makes us uncomfortable.

Let me be clear: safety and academic freedom are not opposites. We can and must create a campus where no one fears for their identity and where students and faculty are free to speak with passion, dissent with integrity, and organise with purpose. That is the real Core.

We ask our students to live in contradiction, to wrestle with competing truths, to defend ideas with rigour and generosity. It is time for our leadership to do the same.

In solidarity with those students who are practicing the very civic courage we claim to teach,

Name withheld
Professor, Representing the Core
Columbia University